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Daily Telegraph
Introduced by
EDITOR'S PICK
Good morning from William Cash, the Mace Editor-in-chief
Red in Tooth and Claw
Labour tears itself apart
"The hand that wields the knife shall never wear the crown” is perhaps the oldest political cliché, but it’s about to be bloodily tested in the political Game of Thrones that has plunged the Labour Party into civil war following Wes Streeting's resignation as Health Secretary and Andy Burnham being given a route to Number 10 via the Makerfield by-election thanks to Labour MP Josh Simons standing aside.
To add to the Jacobean political theatre, Angela Rayner – another contender for Number 10 – was conveniently cleared by HMRC over her tax affairs, leaving her a path to her own leadership bid. In the space of 24 hours her odds to become the next PM went from 5-2 favourite to 5-1 after Burnham entered the fray. He is now evens favourite with the bookies to be the next Labour king.
No one is quite sure where the “never wear the crown” quote came from – it’s not Shakespeare – but it was used by Michael Heseltine in 1986 when he took on Margaret Thatcher for the Conservative Party leadership – and lost. But its meaning is clear: the person who leads a coup or betrayal rarely ends up on the throne.
Forty years after this proved fatal for Heseltine, will it prove true again? The reality is that Burnham's chosen route back to parliament is anything but certain, although it looks almost certain the Labour NEC will allow him to stand this time around.
As the local elections have shown, the Makerfield seat is anything but easy to win against Reform who will send their heavy artillery to crush Labour to win. They will learn from the lessons of Gorton and Denton, also in the Manchester region, where there were legitimate concerns about 'family voting' fraud from the Muslim community.
The local election data must have Nigel Farage and his seasoned by-election operations chief, Paul Nuttall, party vice-chairman, salivating at the opportunity to stop Burnham in his tracks. Reform secured more votes on May 7th than Labour did in the 2024 general election. Eight wards in Makerfield voted in the local elections. Combining the results shows Reform winning 50.4 percent, while Labour manages only 22.7 percent. That is a huge political gamble for Burnham, betting everything on red when the North-West voters are increasingly turning turquoise.
Within hours of the self-styled "King of the North" saying he will stand in the by-election, Nuttall had sent out a statement marshalling branch leaders from around the country to assemble their local troops this weekend - yes, May 16th and 17th - in Sainsbury's car park, Worthington Way, Makerfield, saying "Andy Burnham wants an easy way back to Parliament. We will stop him, but only with your support."
The reality is that the Makerfield by-election offers an unexpected chance for Reform to prove who really is King of the North. If Burnham fails to win, he will be politically blood-eagled. The better news is that the last time he was up for election in Makerfield, in 2024, 62 percent of those who turned out backed him. He is much more a nationally popular - and better recognised - a political figure Burnham is as compared to his rivals for the Labour crown.
The psychodrama surrounding the prime minister’s leadership has now broken into a showdown between Starmer, Streeting, Burnham and Rayner. The talk in Westminster also remains whether Starmer has enough MPs - 81 is required - to support him to challenge Starmer. His allies claim he has the numbers but his distractors say he’s only got around 40 or so. With Angela Rayner now cleared by HMRC of her tax problems, the path is clear for her to enter the race as the “soft-left” candidate offering an alternative to Starmer.
The nightmare problem for Labour is that without Burnham in contention, it would never be a proper leadership contest, leaving Labour badly scarred with no real resolution. Without Burnham, it would have looked like a stitch up. A bloody and bitter Labour civil war would have followed that the party may never have survived. Streeting understood this hence why he bottled a formal leadership challenge saying the field needed all contenders to be in the ring.
With Ed Miliband possibly entering the leadership circus as well, (and don't forget Al Carns, the armed forces minister, or possibly even Darren Jones, chief secretary to the PM), the left looks badly divided. But a Rayner-Burnham alliance of convenience presents problems as Burnham is a former Blairite who has turned leftwards, while Rayner is a former Unison rep and staffer. Indeed, she has strong, long-standing support from the UK’s largest union, which backed her for deputy leader.
Both Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch will be looking at this chaotic Labour pantomime with glee. Rayner would shift the party to the left and probably plunge the markets into the sort of chaos that would make Liz Truss’s disastrous budget look like prudent housekeeping. If the markets meltdown, an election could be closer than we think.
Rayner’s historical support is from public-sector-focused unions who think her background enables her to understand the working-class condition. They include Unison, the CWU (Communication Workers Union), Aslef (train drivers’ union) and The Community union which supported her leadership contests.
To economists and financial analysts, the leftwing trade union backing for Rayner adds up to a terrifying prospect for the UK economy. Rayner is also recognised as a leader of the “soft left” faction, which Burnham has been actively flirting with as Manchester mayor. She acts as a bridge between the Jeremy Corbyn-era hard left and the centrists (Progress/Labour First). She is also backed by party members who want to see stronger representation for working-class voices, a role she leaned into as a former member of the shadow cabinet.
Lucy Carrier-Pilkington has written an insightful piece that exposes all the factions, pressure and lobby groups behind the various pretenders to the Labour crown.
Was I mad to set up a new think tank?
It’s an occupational hazard in the policy world to think in aphorisms and quotes. When setting up a think tank, the first that comes to mind is “Don’t do this at home, kids.” Such are the views of Jonathan Brown who has written for us about what it’s like to set up a new Millbank Tower think tank: the Centre for a Better Britain.
His account of being a think-tank start-up entrepreneur is fascinating. The first challenge was the most existential, he writes. “Why does British politics need another think tank? Wasn’t I just creating yet another talking shop, with an irritating acronym and a Millbank Tower office?”
He says the challenges of both setting up a start-up with all the demands inherent in that endeavour with the controversies of policy work is “like driving a car through a ravine at speed – there have been many handbrake turns and the paintwork gets scratched a lot”
He also mentions the “Overton window” – if you haven’t heard of it, read on. Brown says that the 2024 election was proof that the “Overton window” – which is “the range of ideas acceptable to the general population at any given time” – had shifted dramatically. What might have been considered unsayable just five years ago is now mainstream, while what was mainstream – like net zero – has become “increasingly unpopular”, he writes.
Practitioners, businesspeople and experts, Brown writes, “needed a new forum to discuss real policy options that were both grounded in reality but not completely constrained by the bureaucratic and judicial thinking which has become a permanent barrier to policy solutions in the UK”.
Quite simply, the landscape of think tanks was not keeping up with the times, and there was a vacuum for radical thinking that I could help fill.
Books, banter and stately homes
What do you do next if you used to be an MP? Well, if you’re Damian Collins, former chair of the DCMS select committee, you co-found – with Lady Lucy French – a new literary festival. This week, politicians and journalists have returned to Fleet Street for Festival of Words, the boutique lit fest taking political debate centre-stage.
Politicians and writers have long been conversational bed fellows but something has changed in the British literary festival world. Forget Glastonbury-style camping out in the beer can-strewn fields of Hay-on-Wye, and those long muddy queues to catch “celebrity” authors read from ghosted books they didn’t even write.
A new, chicer breed of bespoke cultural festival has emerged, rooted in politics, and what’s interesting is how in our fractured political age, there is a demand for genuine debate.
Festival of Words has returned this week (12–16 May) to the Fleet Street Quarter, which celebrates the vibrant culture and history of this part of London. Featuring a glitzy line-up of politicians, authors, playwrights and journalists – including James Graham, Hanif Kureishi, Sajid David, Tom Bradby, Iain Dale, Steve Richards and many more – the Festival of Words “celebrates Fleet Street Quarter as the place where stories have always been born”.
The theme this year comes from the opening lines of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness”, a line that nicely sums up the folly and chaos of the last few days of Labour’s attempts to drag the prime minister to the Westminster scaffold. It’s fair to say these Machiavellian goings-on have provided a colourful backdrop for political debate.
Later this month, running from 29 May to 21 June, Tory treasurer David Ross’s Nevill Holt Festival takes this to a new level with the festival’s inaugural Health Agenda Day, a new addition to the programme bringing together leading voices at the forefront of British medicine, policy and research.
Former PM David Cameron will be joining Bloomberg News boss John Micklethwait – a Leicestershire neighbour of David Ross – for a “rare and personal conversation”, setting out Britain’s case as a world leader in genomics and the profound impact of advances in personalised and preventative medicine. Reflecting on both public policy and personal experience, he will explore why he believes real progress is now within reach for patients and families affected by Alzheimer’s, rare diseases and cancer
It’s fair to say that the social use of Ross’s Elizabethan stately pile has come some way since being owned by the pre-war bisexual libertarian society hostess Nancy Cunard. Ditto the super-A-list Cliveden Literary Festival, hosted annually in September at the former pre-war country political salon of Nancy Astor – the first woman seated as an MP – and the louche setting for the scandalous Profumo affair of the 1960s.
Tickets are available for the Fleet Street Festival of Words until the weekend. Website here.
Anyone for lunch?
Meet the Reform Public Affairs team on Tuesday 26 May
We are excited to be launching our new series of cross-party “Meet the Public Affairs Team” lunches and breakfasts. The lunch is part of a series of events with the public affairs teams of major companies and political parties. We kick off on Tuesday 26 May with a business leaders’ lunch at an SW1 private members’ club to meet Reform UK’s public affairs team. This special Business Leaders’ Engagement Lunch will be an opportunity to meet Matthew MacKinnon, director of external affairs at Reform UK, and other senior members of the public affairs team.
The three-course lunch is a chance for public affairs leaders, policy makers and think-tank heads to hear about Reform’s plan to engage with British business and find out more about Reform’s pre-conference Business Day and Business Dinner at the Birmingham NEC on 3 September. The lunch will be Chatham House Rule and will include presentations from key members of the Reform team.
The Mace Summer Lunch
Wednesday 10 June – with guest speaker Jann Martin Schwarz, Head of Thought Leadership and Global Strategy at LinkedIn
Another event for your diary is The Mace Summer Lunch on Wednesday 10 June at the UnHerd Club in Westminster with special guest speakers Jann Schwarz, Senior Director of Thought Leadership and Strategy at LinkedIn, and his UK-based colleague Mimi Turner, Head of Marketplace Innovation. Jann attended Harvard Business School and is flying in from New York for our event at which he will speak on “The corporate value of corporate reputation in an AI age”, as well as telling the story of how LinkedIn has transformed the world of corporate communication and networking.
Book now. Invitations for the three-course lunch, including wine, are extended to all Mace subscribers and corporate members. At £125 per head, including lashings of Provence rose, seats are flying. We are also offering an opportunity for a corporate sponsor to headline-sponsor the VIP lunch and invite a table of six guests.
Please email wendy.coumantaros@macemagazine.com for more information about both events and invitations.
The Strategist: “Money doesn’t buy influence”
Nick Laitner, MD of Teneo, describes his public affairs journey from graduate intern to senior UK political influencer. Agency success, he says, comes from hiring and mentoring the best people. Read more >
The Mace Questionnaire
Andrew Griffith MP, Shadow Business and Trade Secretary. In his Mace Shadow Cabinet profile, the former boss of Sky reveals taking inspiration from Thatcher and Reagan, his love of dark skies and walking his dogs in Sussex. Read more >
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Editor's Note: You’re receiving this because you’ve appeared in, or been shortlisted for, one of our Westminster Indices – described by the Telegraph as ‘an influential Who’s Who’ of Westminster’; or written for us, come to an event of ours, have connected on social media, or else are on our radar as a Leading Individual working in politics, public affairs and strategic comms today. We did write to everybody and thanks for all the positive feedback.
Credits: copy editor Piers Martin, digital editor Oliver Dean, associate publisher Wendy Coumantaros, captain of IT Dan Colburn Smith, designer Cath Mackenzie, managing editor Emelia Wild and editorial assistant Madeline Dabbah.
